Facebook finally joined the hashtag crowd

If you haven't changed your password on Facebook lately, now might not be a bad time to do it.

I don't know if you noticed, but last week Facebook introduced a new look, and a couple of new features.

My recommendation is whenever Facebook is acting strangely or you see new features, change your password and check all of your privacy and account settings, because you don't know what those changes entail until you dig around and find them.

Facebook last week introduced hashtags as a way of facilitating subject searches. A hashtag (#) is used in front of a word, when used together they narrow down a search for that subject to find posts related specifically to that subject.

Hashtags also are used for emphasis or sarcasm or a number of other things that are not easily defined, like #whycantisleep.

Other social networking sites - namely Twitter and Google+ - already use them successfully, so now Facebook has added itself to the hashtag pool, with mixed reactions.

My opinion: A little late in the game, but better late than never. They are useful and can be fun.

Facebook also opened up the graph search that I wrote about a few months ago. It is a multi-level search option that shows you not only pages and people within that search result, but photos and friends who have mentioned or searched for the same search term. You can see my example of a search for ice cream here with my column.

Reddit, Reddit

Have any of you ever heard of Reddit? It's another social networking site that I haven't written about, but it is very popular.

One of the features on the site is called AMA - Ask Me Anything - which spotlights a celebrity or some sort of expert, and Redditors ask them questions - about anything.

Even President Obama was featured in an AMA, a couple of months before last year's election.

Well, we are going to start hosting AMAs each week, but instead of hosting celebrities, we're going to spotlight interesting people in our community.

Our new digital reporter Kelly Price will be the hostess for the events, which we plan to do on Tuesday nights.

Look for more information and a schedule in my column next week.

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Facebook finally joined the hashtag crowd

If you haven't changed your password on Facebook lately, now might not be a bad time to do it.